Don’t tell mom, the babysitter’s doin’ dad
By Mike Johnson

The Babysitters is in that group of movies that won’t get a lot of press on TV or a lot of love from reviewers, but you’ll always find yourself watching it on cable and liking it more every time. The premise is just too beautiful. A very gorgeous Katherine Waterston plays a 16-year-old girl named Shirley who babysits for Michael and Gail Beltran (John Leguizamo and Cynthia Nixon).

Shirley develops a seemingly harmless crush for Michael, but Michael, in a moment of weakness allows the crush to be consummated in a rush of romance while taking her home one night. The scandalous affair could have all potentially been swept under the rug but Michael substantially overpays Shirley for the “babysitting” job, and she gets an emotional and financial jolt from the prostitution. Before you know it, Shirley is operating a prostitution ring that would make Spitzer proud. The price is 200 bucks when she’s working, and she has her best friends hooking up with Michael’s friends… for which she receives 20 percent. A true entrepreneur.

At a New York stop for the flick, Waterston, Leguizamo, and writer/director David Ross discussed the film, which is currently playing all over and is sure to stir up some strong feelings regarding the content. For Waterston, this could be the perfect role to catapult her career. On paper, her character makes a drastic change from anal retentive and shy teen into a sexually-empowered teenage pimp (who hasn’t?), but the actress was able to portray the subtle manners in which the changes occur, and Shirley becomes the character you want on screen. “It’s a great role,” she said. “David wrote a story where good people make bad decisions and that’s so much fun as an actor.”

She continued to say with a smile, “A coming of age and a midlife crisis have a lot of parallels. There’s a need to test the waters, to be different, and to redefine themselves, and I think Michael and Shirley see those needs in each other.”

For a movie in which sex is so prevalent and prostitution becomes an underlying theme, Ross made an interesting decision in choosing to keep the actor’s almost entirely clothed throughout. Nothing is gratuitous, and the sex scenes are left to the audience’s imagination until one sad and powerful moment towards the movies conclusion when Waterston drops trou in a visual commentary on how far her character has come and how far she has fallen at the same time. Ross explained, “Every sex scene we see between Michael and Shirley is there for a reason. We’re seeing them communicate a different way each time. A lot of times they’re not even looking at each other, one time they do try to talk and they’re stumbling over their words, so each time it’s kind of a different side post in their relationship.”

There was a point during the discussion when it turned into an open discussion on Eliot Spitzer and prostitution in general, and I found Ross’ take on it to be the most interesting. “In the movie prostitution is about separating sex from intimacy. From birth you’re told that it’s the most intimate thing you’ll ever do with a person and it’s something you should only do with somebody you love. Putting money in the middle, making it a transaction for Mike and Shirley at least, it’s a way of saying this is not serious, this is a game. They’re both regular people from the middle of the country who you’d never expect would live this kind of life. The money allows you to say this is a secret life, this is a game and we don’t really have feelings for each other if we’re exchanging money.”

Leguizamo’s turning into one of the busiest men in the biz. He wore a producer’s hat on this film in addition to co-starring, and a day before our convo I saw him in a preview for a new M. Night Shamalamadingdong summer flick that will either be weird and awesome or weird and horrible. “I hope you don’t get tired of me, because I don’t get tired of me,” Leguizamo joked, to which Waterston responded, “It’s exhausting just being around you.” Leguizamo was proud of the film and fought hard for it to be made. While it’s not the conventional summer blockbuster or popcorn movie, he enjoyed making a film that intertwines moral questions, drama, and some dark humor with a story driven by sex and infidelity, and he believes they found the right balance. “It takes courage to make a film like this because you can easily turn it into a ride and make it more commercially viable and have the studios at your jock… or you could easily go the other way and have it be grungy and nasty and ‘aren’t these people disgusting?’ But that creates a lot of distance between the audience and the characters. It would make it easy for the audience to say ‘that’s not me, that’s not my life’”

So, John, how do you feel about our shamed Governer and how it relates to the film? “Even spitzer, you cant blame the guy for acting out in a time when everything is so sexualized, everything you see on tv, every show, every commercial is trying to turn you on… what do u do with all this energy? People need to act on it at some point but there’s no outlet, and that’s what I loved about the screenplay. We’re trying to deal with that. How does all that effect a younger person who has no experience, who’s so vulnerable, and who is a sponge and has to take this all in? I don’t have the answers but what happens in this movie is a possible outcome…”

And I sit here asking myself, “Did Dad ever drive the babysitter home?”